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Comment by bollockitis | Hacker News Reader

Aren't alternative JVM languages subject to the same potential legal issues that sparked the Oracle lawsuit? Don't languages like Scala, Groovy, and Kotlin still make use of many Java APIs?

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Oracles lawsuit is centered around Dalvik which is a JVM implementation, I have a hard time understanding on how generating code and using an API is the same thing as that ? But I may miss some nuances here.

Probably not, as long as they distribute correctly under the terms of the license. Android didn't follow the license correctly (although they've since fixed that), which is why they ran into trouble.

kotlin does not reimplement java API. Instead it have it's own "wrappers" for collections and primitive types. This wrappers are just platform specific types that is replaced directly to native ArrayList and others by compiler. This is more like just using Java API instead of reimplementing it. If Oracle will sue someone for using their API to build Java apps - it will be the end for everything.

True, and Scala is exactly the same. It uses Java APIs.

Apache Groovy is also the same.

Why is that in every discussion about Scala some Groovy fanboy pops out? sometimes with a ridiculous claim like "groovy is more popular", or "groovy has better java interoperability"

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They are using GPL'ed version of those APIs, so no.

Google / Apache re-implemented the APIs in a way that conflicted with the GPL.

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